Virtue and Good: Moral Concepts in Medieval Arab-Muslim Thought

Abstract

The content of the scientific article is related to the consideration of a number of key, in the opinion of the authors, aspects of the original ethical approach to the consideration of the moral foundations of “virtue” in the teachings of classical Islamic philosophy.

Virtue in Arab-Muslim philosophy is associated, on the one hand, with a set of ideas inherited from antiquity and expressed primarily by Peripateticism and Neoplatonism, and on the other, with notions of "good deeds" developed in the religious, legal, and ethical thought of Islam. In the first case, the concept of virtue (fadl, fadila) is ontologized and interpreted as a function of the position occupied by a given thing on the ladder of degradation from the highest principles to the lowest states of matter. In the second, virtue (ihsan) is considered in connection with human action and the "intention" that motivates it, through the prism of correlating this action with the classification of deeds established in Islam. In the first case, the opposite of virtue is “vice” (razila), in the second, this should be considered the concept of “ism” (sin), although it is opposite to virtue (ihsan) only insofar as it denotes “forbidden” (haram) actions, whereas in the case where we are talking about “undesirable” (makruh) or “indifferent” (mubah) actions for the will of God, the concept of ihsan appears in fact without its opposite.